Aladdin and Company Part 1

Aladdin & Co.

by Herbert Quick.

CHAPTER I.

Which is of Introductory Character.

Our National Convention met in Chicago that year, and I was one of the delegates. I had looked forward to it with keen expectancy. I was now, at five o'clock of the first day, admitting to myself that it was a bore.

The special train, with its crowd of overstimulated enthusiasts, the throngs at the stations, the bra.s.s bands, bunting, and buncombe all jarred upon me. After a while my treason was betrayed to the boys by the fact that I was not hoa.r.s.e. They punished me by making me sing as a solo the air of each stanza of "Marching Through Georgia," "Tenting To-night on the Old Camp-ground," and other patriotic songs, until my voice was a.s.similated to theirs. But my gorge rose at it all, and now, at five o'clock of the first day, I was seeking a place of retirement where I could be alone and think over the marvelous event which had suddenly raised me from yesterday's parity with the fellows on the train to my present state of exaltation.

I should have preferred a grotto in Vau Vau or some south-looking mountain glen; but in the absence of any such retreat in Chicago, I turned into the old art-gallery in Michigan Avenue. As I went floating in s.p.a.ce past its door, my eye caught through the window the gleam of the white limbs of statues, and my being responded to the soul vibrations they sent out. So I paid my fee, entered, and found the tender solitude for which my heart longed. I sat down and luxuriated in thoughts of the so recent marvelous experience. Need I explain that I was young and the experience was one of the heart?

I was so young that my delegateship was regarded as a matter to excite wonder. I saw my picture in the papers next morning as a youth of twenty-three who had become his party's leader in an important agricultural county. Some, in the shameless laudation of a sensational press, compared me to the younger Pitt. As a matter of fact, I had some talent for organization, and in any gathering of men, I somehow never lacked a following. I was young enough to be an honest partisan, enthusiastic enough to be useful, strong enough to be respected, ignorant enough to believe my party my country's safeguard, and I was prominent in my county before I was old enough to vote. At twenty-one I conducted a convention fight which made a member of Congress. It was quite natural, therefore, that I should be delegate to this convention, and that I had looked forward to it with keen expectancy. The remarkable thing was my falling off from its work now by virtue of that recent marvelous experience which as I have admitted was one of the heart. Do not smile. At three-and-twenty even delegates have hearts.

My mental and sentimental state is of importance in this history, I think, or I should not make so much of it. I feel sure that I should not have behaved just as I did had I not been at that moment in the iridescent cloudland of newly-reciprocated love. Alice had accepted me not an hour before my departure for Chicago. Hence my loathing for such things as nominating speeches and the report of the Committee on Credentials, and my yearning for the Vau Vau grotto. She had yielded herself up to me with such manifold sweetnesses, uttered and unutterable (all of which had to be gone over in my mind constantly to make sure of their reality), that the contest in Indiana, and the cause of our own State's Favorite Son, became sickening burdens to me, which rolled away as I gazed upon the canvases in the gallery. I lay back upon a seat, half closed my eyes, and looked at the pictures. When one comes to consider the matter, an art gallery is a wonderfully different thing from a national convention!

As I looked on them, the still paintings became instinct with life.

Yonder shepherdess shielding from the thorns the little white lamb was Alice, and back behind the clump of elms was myself, responding to her silvery call. The cottage on the mountain-side was ours. That lady waving her handkerchief from the promontory was Alice, too; and I was the dim figure on the deck of the pa.s.sing ship. I was the knight and she the wood-nymph; I the gladiator in the circus, she the Roman lady who agonized for me in the audience; I the troubadour who tw.a.n.ged the guitar, she the princess whose fair shoulder shone through the lace at the balcony window. They lived and moved before my very eyes. I knew the unseen places beyond the painted mountains, and saw the secret things the artists only dreamed of. Doves cooed for me from the clumps of thorn; the clouds sailed in pearly serenity across the skies, their shadows mottling mountain, hill, and plain; and out from behind every bole, and through every leafy screen, glimpsed white dryads and fleeing fays.

Clearly the convention hall was no place for me. "Hang the speech of the temporary chairman, anyhow!" thought I; "and as for the platform, let it point with pride, and view with apprehension, to its heart's content; it is sure to omit all reference to the overshadowing issue of the day--Alice!"

All the world loves a lover, and a true lover loves all the world,--especially that portion of it similarly blessed. So, when I heard a girl's voice alternating in intimate converse with that of a man, my sympathies went out to them, and I turned silently to look. They must have come in during my reverie; for I had pa.s.sed the place where they were sitting and had not seen them. There was a piece of grillwork between my station and theirs, through which I could see them plainly.

The gallery had seemed deserted when I went in, and still seemed so, save for the two voices.

Hers was low and calm, but very earnest; and there was in it some inflection or intonation which reminded me of the country girls I had known on the farm and at school. His was of a peculiarly sonorous and vibrant quality, its every tone so clear and distinct that it would have been worth a fortune to a public speaker. Such a voice and enunciation are never a.s.sociated with any mind not strong in the qualities of resolution and decision.

On looking at her, I saw nothing countrified corresponding to the voice.

She was dressed in something summery and cool, and wore a sort of flowered blouse, the presence of which was explained by the easel before which she sat, and the palette through which her thumb protruded. She had laid down her brush, and the young man was using her mahlstick in a badly-directed effort to smear into a design some splotches of paint on the unused portion of her canvas.

He was by some years her senior, but both were young--she, very young.

He was swarthy of complexion, and his smoothly-shaven, square-set jaw and full red lips were bluish with the subcutaneous blackness of his beard. His dress was so distinctly late in style as to seem almost foppish; but there was nothing of the exquisite in his erect and athletic form, or in his piercing eye.

She was ruddily fair, with that luxuriant auburn-brown hair which goes with eyes of amberish-brown and freckles. These latter she had, I observed with a renewal of the thought of the country girls and the old district school. She was slender of waist, full of bust, and, after a lissome, sylph-like fashion, altogether charming in form. With all her roundness, she was slight and a little undersized.

So much of her as there was, the young fellow seemed ready to absorb, regarding her with avid eyes--a gaze which she seldom met. But whenever he gave his attention to the mahlstick, her eyes sought his countenance with a look which was almost scrutiny. It was as if some extrinsic force drew her glance to his face, until the stronger compulsion of her modesty drove it away at the return of his black orbs. My heart recognized with a throb the freemasonry into which I had lately been initiated, and, all unknown to them, I hailed them as members of the order.

Their conversation came to me in shreds and fragments, which I did not at all care to hear. I recognized in it those inanities with which youth busies the lips, leaving the mind at rest, that the interplay of magnetic discharges from heart to heart may go on uninterruptedly. It is a beautiful provision of nature, but I did not at that time admire it. I pitied them. Alice and I had pa.s.sed through that stage, and into the phase marked by long and eloquent silences.

"I was brought up to think," I remember to have heard the fair stranger say, following out, apparently, some subject under discussion between them, "that the surest way to make a child steal jam is to spy upon him.

I should feel ashamed."

"Quite right," said he, "but in Europe and in the East, and even here in Chicago, in some circles, it is looked upon as indispensable, you know."

"In art, at least," she went on, "there is no s.e.x. Whoever can help me in my work is a companion that I don't need any chaperon to protect me from. If I wasn't perfectly sure of that, I should give up and go back home."

"Now, don't draw the line so as to shut me out," he protested. "How can I help you with your work?"

She looked him steadily in the face now, her intent and questioning regard shading off into a somewhat arch smile.

"I can't think of any way," said she, "unless it would be by posing for me."

"There's another way," he answered, "and the only one I'd care about."

She suddenly became absorbed in the contemplation of the paints on her palette, at which she made little thrusts with a brush; and at last she queried, doubtfully, "How?"

"I've heard or read," he answered, "that no artist ever rises to the highest, you know, until after experiencing some great love. I--can't you think of any other way besides the posing?"

She brought the brush close to her eyes, minutely inspecting its point for a moment, then seemed to take in his expression with a swift sweeping glance, resumed the examination of the brush, and finally looked him in the face again, a little red spot glowing in her cheek, and a glint of fire in her eye. I was too dense to understand it, but I felt that there was a trace of resentment in her mien.

"Oh, I don't know about that!" she said. "There may be some other way. I haven't met all your friends, and you may be the means of introducing me to the very man."

I did not hear his reply, though I confess I tried to catch it. She resumed her work of copying one of the paintings. This she did in a mechanical sort of way, slowly, and with crabbed touches, but with some success. I thought her lacking in anything like control over the medium in which she worked; but the results promised rather well. He seemed annoyed at her sudden accession of industry, and looked sometimes quizzically at her work, often hungrily at her. Once or twice he touched her hand as she stepped near him; but she neither reproved him nor allowed him to retain it.

I felt that I had taken her measure by this time. She was some Western country girl, well supplied with money, blindly groping toward the career of an artist. Her accent, her dress, and her occupation told of her origin and station in life, and of her ambitions. The blindness I guessed,--partly from the manner of her work, partly from the inherent probabilities of the case. If the young man had been eliminated from this problem with which my love-sick imagination was busying itself, I could have followed her back confidently to some rural neighborhood, and to a year or two of painting portraits from photographs, and landscapes from "studies," and exhibiting them at the county fair; the teaching of some pupils, in an unnecessary but conscientiously thrifty effort to get back some of the money invested in an "art education" in Chicago; and a final reversion to type after her marriage with the village lawyer, doctor or banker, or the owner of the adjoining farm. I was young; but I had studied people, and had already seen such things happen.

But the young man could not be eliminated. He sat there idly, his every word and look surcharged with pa.s.sion. As I wondered how long it would be until they were as happy as Alice and I, the thought grew upon me that, however familiar might be the type to which she belonged, he was uncla.s.sified. His accent was Eastern--of New York, I judged. He looked like the young men in the magazine ill.u.s.trations--interesting, but outside my field of observation. And I could not fail to see that girl must find herself similarly at odds with him. "But," thought I, "love levels all!" And I freshly interrogated the pictures and statues for transportation to my own private Elysium, forgetful of my unconscious neighbors.

My attention was recalled to them, however, by their arrangements for departure, and a concomitant slightly louder tone in their conversation.

"It's just a spectacular show," said he; "no plot or anything of that sort, you know, but good music and dancing; and when we get tired of it we can go. We'll have a little supper at Auriccio's afterward, if you'll be so kind. It's only a step from McVicker's."

"Won't it be pretty late?" she queried.

"Not for Chicago," said he, "and you'll find material for a picture at Auriccio's about midnight. It's quite like the Latin Quarter, sometimes."

"I want to see the real Latin Quarter, and no imitation," she answered.

"Oh, I guess I'll go. It'll furnish me with material for a letter to mamma, however the picture may turn out."

"I'll order supper for the Empress," said he, "and--"

"And for the ill.u.s.trious Sir John," she added. "But you mustn't call me that any more. I've been reading her history, and I don't like it. I'm glad he died on St. Helena, now: I used to feel sorry for him."

"Transfer your pity to the downtrodden Sir John," he replied, "and make a real living man happy."

They pa.s.sed out and left me to my dreams. But visions did not return. My idyl was spoiled. Old-fashioned ideas emerged, and took form in the plain light of every-day common-sense. I knew the wonderfully gorgeous spectacle these two young people were going to see at the play that night, with its lights, its music, its splendidly meretricious Orientalism. And I knew Auriccio's,--not a disreputable place at all, perhaps; but free-and-easy, and distinctly Bohemian. I wished that this little girl, so arrogantly and ignorantly disdainful (as Alice would have been under the same circ.u.mstances) of such European conventions as the chaperon, so fresh, so young, so full of allurement, so under the influence of this smooth, dark, and pa.s.sionate wooer with the vibrant voice, could be otherwise accompanied on this night of pleasure than by himself alone.

"It's none of your business," said the voice of that cold-hearted and slothful spirit which keeps us in our groove, "and you couldn't do anything, anyhow. Besides, he's abjectly in love with her: would there be any danger if it were you and your Alice?"

"I'm not at all sure about him or his abjectness," replied my uneasy conscience. "He knows better than to do this."

"What do you know of either of them?" answered this same Spirit of Routine. "What signify a few sentences casually overheard? She may be something quite different; there are strange things in Chicago."

"I'll wager anything," said I hotly, "that she's a good American girl of the sort I live among and was brought up with! And she may be in danger."

"If she's that sort of girl," said the Voice, "you may rely upon her to take care of herself."